Spent the entire month of January in Colombia S.America. And just got back from 3 weeks in Australia!

Both trips were awesome and I did many things. I will post up a little bit of chit chat and some pics. Still organizing nearly 3k photos and video though! May be kind of hard to post it all up in order so prolly just do some random posts of the trips...

So to get this started here is a couple videos.

This one is of me driving a Yuri4x4 buggy in Toowoomba, Australia. Yuri is a great guy who I deal with for parts. He also has the same favorite Aussie beer as me!



This is a video of me skydiving over the Whitsunday Islands in Queensland, Australia. Whitsunday Islands are 76 islands off the coast of Airlie Beach which all this is right on the Great Barrier Reef! The video is cut off by photobucket so until I get the whole 7+minutes loaded up somewhere else enjoy the short version!

*warning* foul language!

Nice

still suffering from jet lag.

so enjoy some pics!

day one Aus...at the airport with Steve's G60.



Steve and me getting pissed over breakfast, day one!



me standing next to Chris's comp G60 which is one badass truck! Look for it in this years Tuff Truck.



Pics of Yuri's latest comp buggy...which runs MQ C200 front diffs at both ends for 4wheel steering! That is 40" rubber btw....








Yuri's older Toyota based buggy...on 44" tires.





Out in the buggy having some fun! This was in Toowoomba Australia on some private property down the street from Yuri's house.

damn, i wanna join you on your next vacation!! haha great pics, and those buggies are SICK!

Damn steering wheel's on the wrong side.

That's a nice pile of dead soldiers for breakfast there

These guys must have some cash. Nice garage full of toys there.

And yes, I want to go.

Check out the Ford!

Sounds like a fun trip. I wanna go too.

LOL, we are going on his next vacation! AZ Run 8!

Well going to try and finish this post up...it is all copy and paste now from my forum so I should be able to manage!

Ok so I got some pictures up. This is not going to be in the order I did things. Seems this is a Patrol forum so I will start with Patrols and move to some other cars before boring people with the tourist pics.

Hector has a 2004 4.8L Patrol and a 78 Patrol he is building into a beast. The 78 Patrol has a GQ 5spd and x-fer mated to the stock P40 engine. It also has H233 GQ diffs set up on a SoA. The truck is huge, like 7.5 feet tall! And as you can see it is real wide. He has lockers front and rear too. Hector also has a 1971 Doge Demon which is real nice. He has stroked the stock 318 v8 to a 340. The thing is fast and awesome! I drove the 2004 Patrol and man it just made me mad I can't have one!

I saw Patrols from all years every day. It was typical to see a half dozen MQ/MK's per day and as many as 30 G60s! At one point I saw a total of 8 LG60s at a gas station but unfortunately didn't get pics of that. I only saw one G60 pickup while in Colombia, in great condition but lacked the stock bed. I didn't see any 4W66's but we didn't go looking for them either. I also didn't see any Delta Mini-Cruisers I saw last trip. This blue Patrol is built a bit and is a 1967. The orange Patrol is mid-1970s and was typical of the kind of Patrols I saw every day. The orange was a factory color.










The MQ Patrol was sold for 3yrs under the name Nissan Samurai in Colombia. Then they got sued by Suzuki and had to drop the name. You can still see some Patrols in Colombia wearing the Samurai badges and everyone knows them as Nissan Samurai. The green Patrol was a special model for churches, ie nuns. It has a high roof but just on the back and it is a 4 door.







This is Helmuts mid-90 GQ Patrol with a stretched roof...

There are several 4x4 clubs in Bogota. One club held a competition one weekend and I got to go. They had 3 classes...stock, modified and heavily modded. On the day of the show only stock trucks ran and 2 heavily modded ones.

The blue FJ40 is pretty heavily modded with ARB lockers, ect. Other than the buggy everything else here are stock trucks, ie open diffs and not much lift if any. I was pretty impressed with the driver skill in the stock trucks. All trucks ran the course and only the red Heep got broken!

alright...so going to try and post up the rest of the pics from the trips...

will not be in the order I did things but hey that has already happened in this thread!

While in Colombia I went to a car show. This was the last day I was in Colombia. We got together with the Dodge Demon club and drove around for an hour or two then went to the car show. It was pretty cool and not a bad last day in the country!







and here is Hector doing a burnout in his Demon! :twisted:

The first weekend in Colombia we went to a place called Villa De Leyva which was about 300k's from Bogota. It is a very old Village and the food was beyond good! Just like most of Colombia it was real cheap too! The area used to produce a lot of grapes (wine) but since the climate is changing they are doing more tomatoes.




the cabin I stayed in while in Villa De Leyva, it was up on top of a mountain!

The area around Villa De Leyva is very rich in fossils. I found several just walking around the bush, thunder eggs were everywhere. In the late 1970's they found a very complete and very rare fossil. So they built a museum around it!








Outside the museum was a bunch of locals selling fossils. This is a piece of million year old dino shit I bought from them! It now resides on my coffee table. Customs was interested in this one until I told them it was petrified shit!!

About 50ks outside Bogota is a mountain that is completely salt. It is odd because you couldn't tell from above ground but under ground is nothing but hard salt type rock. It is mined but they also built this church or cathedral underground in the salt mine/caverns. Basically there are many tunnels that all lead down to over 500ft deep. They open up into large caverns and all this is man made! Some of the large caverns are nearly 100ft tall. It takes several hours to walk most of it, that is how large the underground complex is. And for some reason they built a church out of all the tunnels and caverns. They even hold services down there! But mostly it seems to be a tourist attraction. Most pics didn't turn out well because I was trying to capture the lighting they had down there. :roll:









massive salt pillar...


The helmets of all the people who died building this! :shock: :?


the hand of god....

While in Colombia I went to the city of Cartagena. This is the most famous city in Colombia. Founded by the Spanish way back in the 1400/1500's. Cartagena sits on the Caribbean side of the coast. This place is the real deal when it comes to Pirates of the Caribbean. The city has a "white" wall built around it for protection from the pirates. There is only two ways into the bay. Way back when the Spanish filled one way in with rocks. The other way in they built two castles,/forts, one on each land mass at the entrance to the bay. They would stretch a long chain across the inlet between both forts, keep it just under water. Pirate ships would sail into the chain and they would just bombard them with cannons from the forts! Also in the city is a large fort, old town and a very old monastery up on top of a mountain. It is a city filed with art, culture, great food, crafts and lots of tourist stuff. They used a lot of coral in the old city wall which was different to see. This city was the most expensive place I went in Colombia but it was still cheap!











all bow before the mighty golden goat!! :twisted:












Of course eating is abig part of "taking it easy"! Here is a $30 plate of lobster. Huge serving and this was the most expensive thing on the menu!

alright so nearly done with Colombia and then on to Australia!

After 2 days in Cartagena I went on out to the islands off the coast. There is 26 islands off the coast of Cartagena called the Rosario Islands. These islands all pretty much have reefs around them, mangrove forests, resorts and locals. I stayed at a small resort called Isla Del Sol or Island of the Sun. It was really nice....ran about $125 a night for the room, transpo to and from island and 3 home cooked square meals a day. All I had to buy was water and beer. The beer was only $1-2 a bottle with tip! I laid around on the beach, swam in the tropical warm waters, toured the islands and reefs, went snorkeling a bunch, went to an outdoor aquarium and drank muchos cervezas! Both Cartagena and the Rosario Islands were way awesome. I for sure plan to go back some time and highly recommend it to anyone going to S.America.

The hotel I stayed at on the island..



the snorkeling hut and reef I spent a lot of time on...



from around the islands...







Blimey!











The boat I rode on... :roll:



There was a sail boat that got hung up on the reef right off shore from the hotel I was at...



So that is about it for Colombia...the rest of it I am keeping to myself! :twisted:

Australia...

well, we already posted pics of getting drunk at Steve's first day. I posted pics of my skydive over the Whitsunday Islands, posted most the pics from the weekend at Yuri's in Toowoomba.

Basically I got to Oz and spent a couple days with Mark. He then had a family emergency and I needed to go stay with Steve. So off to Steve's house it was. Spent the better part of a week around Sydney where Steve lives. Nice city and I really like the Royal National Park which is just outside the city. Steve loaned me his wifes car, I grabbed some maps and went for a drive. It was crazy driving on the wrong side of the road through a huge city, RHD car too! After I had been in Oz for a few weeks it was no big deal but this first time was an adventure. I made it on up to the Royal Park and spent the day enjoying the beaches, hiking trails and such. My first weekend in Oz we went on the Stockton Beach trip where I drank a bit to much!

After the week around Sydney I went up to Queensland. I wanted to see some country so had a few trips planned. Thanks a bunch to Steve for his help planning and arranging stuff! Any ways, I went up to Airlie Beach north of Brisbane. Airlie Beach is on the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef which isn't far off shore. Also off shore from Airlie Beach is the Whitsunday Islands. A very awesome place that is hot, beautiful and has plenty of things to do. There is something like 72 islands that make up the Whitsundays. Thing was though they had been flooding up in this area of Queensland and some other places. So while connecting flights in Brisbane I got informed the road to Airlie Beach was closed. They said it it was flooded and they couldn't promise me a way into Airlie Beach. Great I though he comes the hassles of traveling! So I went on up there anyways, figured I would just wing it. Well sure enough it was flooding and pissing some serious rain! Haha but the buses were running so I jumped on one and hoped we would make it to Airlie Beach. It was sooo funny but the bus driver forded a section of road about 24-30 inches of water. And that was it we made it to Airlie Beach! The next day the sun came out and it began to get better weather as the week went on. I stayed in Airlie Beach for 5 days.

After that I went down to Brisbane and stayed a night with Ben aka Wicked on boards. Got to see his MQ and hang out for the night. The next day I went on up to Towoomba and stayed at Yuri's place for the weekend. It was awesome, we went out in his buggy, went to another car show and drank plenty of beer! From Towoomba I went back to Brisbane and then caught a flight up to Hervey Bay. Off the coast of Hervey Bay is Fraser Island. This is the largest sand island in the world. It is covered with dunes, beach, old ship wrecks, jungle, fresh water lakes and tons of 4wd tracks! I rented a 4wd from one of the local outfits. At first it was a Suzuki soft top from like 94. But the first hour I had it on the island it was breaking down! So I called them up on my cell phone to raise hell and they had a new truck to me in 30 mins or less. It was the only spare on the island and happened to be a Toyota Hilux duel cab with the diesel! That is right Ferdy a Toyota! Haha I was happy I got it for the price of the Suzuki and it was way better. Fraser Island blew me away...the place is just awesome and hard to describe so I will let the pictures do that. I spent 3 days and nights camping and 4wd'ing around Fraser Island. The trip was incredible...I will remember it the rest of my life!

After Fraser I was going to go down the Sunshine Coast but I changed my mind. Was getting low on cash and wanting to cut the trip in Queensland short. So I headed back down to Sydney and spent the last 5 days or so in Oz at Steve's place. We just hung out, drank beer, ate good food, went fishing, went 4wd'ing and some other things like the trip up to see Chris's G60 comp truck. It was nice, I had a good time with Steve and am glad we got to become friends man!!

So here is random pics from around Sydney...

mnnnn beer


Nissan Homer!!



^4spd on the tree...lmao

my big fish! ops:



Ferdie's SWB G60 under frame off...



Stockton Beach...






Steve's G60 :shock:




Chris's G60 and GU double cab Ute! :twisted: